Chinese adverbs

Abstract

The category of adverbs in Chinese, as is its counterpart in English, is featured by morphological, syntactic and semantic heterogeneity. The heterogeneity poses the questions of the categorial coherence and the conflicting criteria in identifying adverbs. This paper starts with the definition of adverbs in Cognitive Grammar and analyzes degree adverbs, temporal adverbs, scope adverbs, manner adverbs, attitude adverbs and negation adverbs in Chinese. It is found that they all profile a relationship with a relational trajector, consistent with the proposal in Cognitive Grammar, but the precise relationship has to be specified. Some adverbs can also serve as mental space builders. Moreover, the morphological and syntactic behaviors of adverbs can be motivated to different degrees by their semantic functions. The paper attempts to establish the categorial status of adverbs. It develops the semantic account of lexical categories and motivates the formal aspects of language from meaning.